Sunday, July 30, 2006

Well, it seems that my fancy about part being a determinative was just that. In an e-mail, John Payne pointed me to the discussion of half in the CGEL, where he and Rodney Huddleston argue that half and other fractions are nouns. As evidence, they remind us that they can be plural and can take a determiner, two key properties of nouns. Indeed, the same thing is true of part.

1. It's part table and part desk.1b. He's one part father and two parts geek.2. Part of the money is gone.2b. This part of the picture is missing.

Geoffrey Pullum, in another mail writes,

(Part) participates in a number of idiomatic constructions with anarthrous nominals: compare "part man, part animal" with "step by step" or "bog Irish" or "cap in hand" or "hand on heart" or "foot in mouth" or "weather permitting" (etc. etc.): there are hundreds of special phrases in which nouns that normally need an article don't have them.

Finally, Rodney Huddleston takes it further, arguing that, despite what some dictionaries (e.g., the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) say, part is still a noun, even when it modifies an adjective or verb as in:

3. The object was part hidden by the grass.

Note that NPs can function as adjunct in clause structure, as in "I saw her THIS MORNING", and we argue that this holds for single word NPs too, as in "I saw her YESTERDAY". There's no more reason for assigning yesterday to different CATEGORIES in this and "Yesterday was completely wasted" than there is for assigning this morning to different categories in the corresponding examples where it replaces yesterday.

So, it looks like part is just a noun, albeit one that can appear in quite a range of functions, except, I suppose, when it's a verb. Too bad so many dictionaries have only got it part right.

Friday, July 28, 2006

I was adding entries to the Simple English Wiktionary (good practice for English teachers and students alike), and part was the next word on my list. As I put in example sentences, it occurred to me that part was acting very much like a determinative[1]. Consider these examples:

1. It's part table and part desk.2. Part of the money is gone.3. I gave them $10 in part payment.

However, it doesn’t work in:4. *Part money is missing.5. *Part the money is missing.

which is the normal place for a determinative to work. So what do you think? Obviously, part is a noun, but is it also a determinative?

[1] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language uses determinative for a word class, and determiner for the role in phrase structure.

Two recent threads on Language Log, word classes and style guides, brought to mind one thing that baffled me when I began college teaching: FANBOYS. The first time I walked into our writing centre, I noticed that FANBOYS was pasted in large letters across one wall. While many readers may be familiar with FANBOYS, I'd never heard of them, but according to many freshman writing textbooks, FANBOYS is a mnemonic for the co-ordinating conjunctions in English (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, & so). Many style guides go so far as to state that when one of the FANBOYS is used to join two independent clauses, it must be preceded by a comma.

Of course, FANBOYS, as articulated above, is a myth. It is a myth in the sense that it is a fiction created to deal with a uncertain world in a simple way. It’s a myth in the sense that it is a belief that is shared by members of a certain community and, to a certain extent, identifies that community, the community being college composition teachers and their students (insomuch as each individual buys into the myth.) It’s a myth in the sense that it has taken on great import among the community of believers. And finally, it’s a myth in the sense it can serve a gate-keeping function, preserving power for those who know or “understand” it and denying it to those who don’t.

As the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explains, only and, but, and or are prototypical coordinators, while nor is very close. So and yet share more properties with conjunctive adverbs (e.g., however), and "for...lack(s) most of the properties distinguishing prototypical coordinators from prepositions with clausal complements" (p. 1321). Furthermore, there are other ways to coordinate independent clauses in English.

So, where did this myth come from? Perhaps some influential author, reflecting their own personal preference, wrote something like: Where a clause is followed by a coordinator and a clause that could be either dependent or independent, a comma before the coordinator signals that the second clause is independent[1]. This very limited observation could then have been over generalised. Yet, how one arrives at FANBOYS as a list of coordinators is difficult to imagine.

Whatever its origin, the myth, once established, seems to have become part of teacher lore and been propagated through other usage and writing books, their authors copying slavishly from those that came before[2]. The reason for its staying power is clear: like any good myth, it gives the faithful a comfortingly simple handhold in a confusing world—in this case, that of composition. To paraphrase Knoblauch and Brannon in Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, it is extremely hard to teach students to be good writers; it is much easier to teach them the myth of FANBOYS.

In talking to many writing teachers, I have found that the majority of them, despite many years of post-secondary education, often leading to post-graduate degrees, were unaware of the myth of FANBOYS until they began teaching college composition. In a number of cases, they have told me that this led to a certain amount of anxiety. They wondered how they could have missed this rule. However, as they became acculturated into the college composition teaching culture, they internalized the myth and now many believe it to be both true and important for their students to learn. And so it goes...

[1] Consider the change in meaning caused by the insertion of a comma before and in Karla Homolka’s post-prison statement in a Radio Canada interview, “I don’t want people to think I am dangerous and I’m going to do something to their children.” (July 5, 2005)

[2] In one example of such unthinking writing, Wong (2002) states, “each of the following coordinating conjunctions can link words, phrases, and clauses in parallel structures… and but for nor or so yet” (p. 365). So what individual words (that are not clauses) can be coordinated by so or for?